Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Before I visited LA I thought that portrayals of the police like this were charicatures, but no. It's pretty accurate. LA might be one of the most diverse cities in the world but the makeup of the people who basically control the city and form the dominant culture for rich people is so white that it might as well be Iowa. This is no exagerration. There's the same sort of insular, parochial, whiter than white whitebread menatlity among the elite in LA that you'd find in isolated areas of the midwest. Not just white but extremely white. You get the picture. Not just ignorant about the cultures that surround them but ignorant of everything except the most mainstream white culture. Maybe they have some awareness of the Irish. Point is, the cops work for them, and the cops have traditionally come from the same sorts of extremely white communities that the power broker families originally came from, hence the portrayal of them in the NWA video.